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I am Professor and Chair of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I am also the editor of the academic journal The Latin Americanist.

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Thursday, April 10, 2014

Some may have a political agenda geared toward supporting the Castro dictatorship - instead of supporting the people of Cuba – and wish to put an end to these successful programs.

This is a doozy on all levels. In what way can that program and the hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID be considered "successful"? Show me exactly what policy goals have been achieved. The logic is positively illogical. The programs exist, therefore they are successul.

Those who support the embargo and many of the ill-conceived covert operations are indirectly supporting the dictatorship. The more the U.S. opens to Cuba, the more it will change in ways that the dictatorship will be unable to control. Cutting the country off enhances that control. The USAID money pit is good for PR and contractors (who are making a bundle) but not for Cubans.

I'll repeat a point I made two years ago in a Military Review article, which is that American money won't cause change in Cuba.

To make a legitimate claim that a policy supports the people of Cuba, you must first acknowledge that the policies followed since the Eisenhower administration have strengthened the Castro regime. Then you must accept that many people--like me--hope for democracy in Cuba just like you even though they believe that a strategy should be discarded if it has failed to achieve its goals in 55 years. Once we talk openly about those two things then we have some possibility of a more successful strategy that actually helps Cuban people.

So if I have a political agenda, it's that I strongly favor common sense.